He Might Cheat the Living
by of a dragon's tear
Summary: ...but the Devil garners no sympathy in death. Two-shot.


**Disclaimer: I don't own The Outsiders.**

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><p><strong>Part I of II<strong>

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><p><em>You know a guy a long time, and I mean really know him, you don't get used to the idea that he's dead just overnight.<em>

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><p>"Clarence."<p>

I clapped a thin film of dust from my palms. Verne, my boss, knows he can't smoke in the autopsy room. But it's been a week since the Sheldon-stabbing fiasco, and the entire PD's swamped from now till January.

I tried not to look up, lest a yellow smoke ring wreath me.

"Yes, sir."

"I'd like you to go with the locals on this one, Clarence." Verne crushed his cigarette into a corner of the counter, then flicked the ashes into the sink beside the fume hood. I peeled off my scrubs one by one. I'd just finished suturing a drowned woman's lungs.

I sighed. "Ain't the community numb yet?"

"Mmm. Another teenage boy," he said, "who don't carry as much stigma 'round here." Twin pillars of smoke hissed through his nostrils. "Lord knows we need another Robert Sheldon threatening to sue the pants off every grade-B prosecutor in town."

"Why you want me?"

"You're a smart man. You figure out why."

I sighed again.

"Boys and their guns," he said. "Grown-up toys, Clarence. No one cleans house for them."

"Except for me."

"That's what I pay you a goddamn lawyer's salary for."

Not the least bit true. But my jobs pay all right; they put food on the table. I'm half-coroner and half-mortician. I either cut dead bodies open or clean them up, prep them for burial. It's not fabulous party conversation, but somebody's got to deal with the pile-up somewhere on down the line.

"Shooting, huh? Sounds pretty standard," I said, running the water from the sink. "How'd the vic go?" At the PD the four things they taught you in regards to shooting were: bad motive, bad communication, bad luck, and bad timing. "Bad round of roulette?"

Verne said nothing, and I blinked. He usually fires himself off in a briefing. He reached again for his lighter; I seized his pack of cigarettes and threw them in my watebasket.

"You'll kill yourself faster than the Russians smack us with the A-bomb, Verne."

Verne smiled. His eyes were dead.

"The file's downstairs."

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><p>Police scuttled. Someone cut the tape with a Swiss knife.<p>

Winston, Dallas N., aged seventeen. DOB: July 26th, 1949. DOD: September 21st, 1966. Suicide by police fire. Post-mortem.

Two days after the shooting . . . I considered myself damn-shootin'-lucky if I got a post-mortem case two weeks old.

We covered the body with the rip-stop canvas after the principal cleaners were done. The blood had been scrubbed from the pavement, although a ghost of red radiated just below the surface of the rock. (Freeman Street was laden with potholes and notorious for soaking liquids like a sponge. Drivers constantly complained of the road smelling of pigs and booze.) Blood had seeped into the concrete and would sit there and decompose until it was removed. And unless the city OKed the notion that we rip up the grid below the concrete, the road would smell even worse than before.

We'd come to an agreement. The road would remain untouched, but the rock surrounding the body and struck by bullets were to be lifted "for study." Even though that was extremely unnecessary for the public to know. The press ate it up and spit it out. Goddamn politics.

A boy with russet hair stood just beyond the yellow tape, arms folded across his chest. Studying us. The local police was a little more aware of this boy than the others who passed by, shooting him glances here and there, although I couldn't see why no one had shooed him off yet.

A spindle flickered between the corners of his mouth. He spit it out when I approached him. He looked pretty solid, but it wasn't anything I hadn't seen before.

"You've been staring at us all day, son," I said. "What do you want?"

He blinked, probably at the prospect of some faceless authority taking time out to talk to him. His eyes flashed for a minute. Then his gaze turned cool.

"Your, uh, your pals find my blade yet?" He swallowed at the word _pals_. A muscle in his jaw twitched. "I let Dallas borrow it. It's a black-handled switch." His Adam's apple rose with the inflection in his voice, and I could tell he felt constricted around the cops. If I looked like him, I would be too. "I, uh, need it back."

"I'm sorry, they've already stripped the body of items," I said.

"But it's mine."

"If they found anything, I'm sure they would have notified you."

His lungs decompressed like balloons.

"I've got to get back," I said. Normally I'd hate being so blunt, but preserving a body before the real damage begins is an extremely time-sensitive mission. "Go home."

"What're you doing to Dallas?"

"Is that his name?" Between a constant stream of cases, including a woman who'd drowned when her hair got tangled in a pool rafter and an over-inflated businessman who'd ODed on morphine, I'd forgotten. "Dallas?"

Russet-Hair laughed bitterly. "You're takin' him away and you don't even know his name." Then his laughter broke, and turned into something else. He covered his face with the sleeve of his jacket, quivering for a moment. When I began to speak his head snapped up, red and pinched.

"Don't tell me—you _lost_ my blade." He laughed again, a dry, brittle sound erutping from the bottom of his throat. "Don't tell me—don't tell me—don't—"

He began hyperventilating.

"Clarence?" someone called out. "Everything all right at your end?"

"We're fine," I said. A van door slammed.

Russet-Hair shot me a look that reminded me of an animal caught in blazing headlights.

"But it's so _wrong—_I—"

"Breathe, kid," I said. I didn't have time for this. I really didn't.

"I can't."

"Just breathe."

"_Fuck off."_ He spun around, seeming to choke on his own words. "I can't breathe—I can't feel my hands—oh God, what's wrong with my hands?"

The others were shooting us puzzled glances. But this didn't seem to register with old Russet-Hair.

"Nothing's wrong. Breathe in through your nose and out your mouth," I hissed. "Breathe."

"I can't—my legs won't—"

"Breathe, just _breathe_, dammit—"

He fell onto the pavement. I dropped to my knees to hold his head up. A thin stream of blood trickled from his left nostril, where he'd hit the rock. His face had turned a bright glow of vermilion. He was still sharply breathing in and out, laughing and crying in turns.

"I don't wanna die," he kept murmuring. "Oh, damn, oh, dammit, I can't die here."

Then he laughed again.

"Clarence!"

I snapped my head back, avoiding some incriminary stares. "He's having a panic attack."

"I'm _dyiiin_'," he singsonged, his voice thin. "Just like old Dally and Johnny."

His hands were frozen in the usual position of the thumb sticking out and the forefingers unable to unlock themselves. When someone has an anxiety attack, their breathing becomes shallow, and oxygen flow to the extremities rises too high and too fast. Sufferers often report of sensations of cold and tingling. Some people may feel as though they are not really inside their own bodies—depersonalization, or that the world itself isn't real—detachment. They misdiagnose themselves as dying in some way, which only further fuels the symptoms. All of this is usually caused by racing thoughts and hyperventilation. When someone experiences a panic attack the first thing to do is get their breathing down. Slow it down.

_Slow it down._ "You're not dying, kid. Breathe slow now. You're having an anxiety attack. Don't think about it. Just think about breathing slowly."

Russet-Hair slowed his breathing a little, then, looking up with something illuminating the steely burn in his eyes, stuck his middle finger in the air.

"Fuck you, man," he whispered. "Fuck you."

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><p>"So what's this I hear about a crazy kid passin' out at the crime scene?" Verne said on the drive back to the lab. I wasn't paying any attention, chewing on a Tootsie stick that had lost its flavor fifteen minutes ago.<p>

"Russet-Hair?"

"Who?" he said.

Whoops.

"The crazy kid."

"Yeah. Him."

"He was hyperventilating. I contacted the hospital and then his mother," I clarified. Calling his mother, I could easily see where his hysterics came from. It took me five solid minutes trudging through her shrills before I could explain he'd had a simple panic attack.

I threw my Tootsie stick out the window. "Didn't help matters much the kid was crocked off his rock."

"Friend of the vic?"

"He knew his name."

"I know your name, and you and I don't go out paintin' the town red."

Flattery gets you nowhere, even if you do have three degrees like Verne.

"You'd also never pass out if I died."

He smiled grimly.

"True."

We rode in uneasy silence.

"What's the matter, Verne?"

"My boy," he said, smiling, "got a nice ol' letter from the government the other day."

"Oh, jeez." I couldn't think of anything else to say. We weren't close enough for me to start criticizing the fundamental flaws of government, but it just seemed too cold and distant to simply say, "I'm sorry," since thousands of fathers hear the same old drivel every day.

Silence seemed the happy medium. I fingered the seat belt's eject button; Dinah Washington wafted through the car.

"They're thinking of sending thirty grand overseas." Verne switched off the radio. "You afraid of your boy bein' packed-'n'-shipped, Clarence?"

"What?"

"Jesus H. Christ," Verne snapped, "you're either too dense to know your own name or too focused for your own good." He turned a sharp left, cutting off a dark green Ford pickup. "I asked you if you were afraid of your boy bein' shipped off."

"Huh," I said, licking the inside of my cheek. I'd never been this frank with my boss before. Of course it wasn't beyond my scope to know other hard-handed dictators like Verne had feelings and weaknesses, but I just found it strange he would even ask me about my opinions. Most of the time our conversations consisted of: _Knock, knock, Clarence. _New case?_ Yep. _How much time?_ That's up to you. _How much?_ Proportional to what you work. As always, Clarence. _Raise?_ Hell no._

I was afraid of many things. Too many things, actually. As a mortician you're aware of death on more senses than you'd think. You can smell it; you can touch it; you can feel it pressing down on you from some dark crevice of the light. I suppose the horrors of everyday life surpass these, though; I'd go under fire if I said the greatest enemy was not death but life. But it was true. Life held disease, old age, hatred, greed, anger, murder, rape, fire, flood, pain, errors, regrets, fear, depression, loneliness. Death offered release from all these things.

Sometimes my wife would cry in the middle of the night, claiming she could "smell it on me." Smell what? She never explained, and I never pressed her. She was always very sensitive; she could feel where I couldn't, or, more accurately, wouldn't. But thinking about Verne's question—in this world full of indifference and death, why should I carry one more human being's fears as my own?

"I'm afraid of him turning tail on his country more than anything," I said finally, after feeling Verne's eyes pricking my profile for a coon's age.

Verne smiled sadly. His teeth glistened from the ruddy folds of a mouth draping them. "Don't be so alpha-male. Tell me what you think."

There was a long silence.

"Yeah," I said. "I suppose you could say I'm scared shitless."

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><p>Unraveled in the light, he looked short. Stocky. His left arm was scarred—the peeled skin residues pointed to a fire. He had many more scars on his legs and chest; he obviously had weathered much more than the average Joe. But what? I tried to picture his life but failed miserably, as I usually do. Last week, I'd guessed the woman who drowned was married because of a slight discoloration on her left ring finger. It was a birthmark and she was a lesbian. Two days later, I'd guessed the businessman had overdosed accidentally because he was respected in his office and never touched the stuff before. He'd been addicted for five years.<p>

There was a good reason I made a decent mortician: I sure as hell was no author.

I had no script to read but the remnants the body left behind. Ice-white eyelashes. I wondered what color lay behind them; I could have very well checked, but Lord, I wasn't morbid. I did mental assesment instead. Caucasian, or slightly Eurasian, small nose ridge, raised cheekbones, small teeth. Most likely light blue or light brown eyes. White tufts of hair. The skin was translucent and appeared to sink into his face, particularly around the areas where the skin is thinnest—under the eyes and the lips.

Formaldehyde—the coroner's elixir. It preserves the body's outer "shell", so to speak. Post-mortem, bodily fluids either run loose, or, if they remain in the body, rot the organs.

While we were still lackeys in med school, my roommate and I used to soak pigs' eyeballs in formaldehyde and bounce them around the room.

I waited four hours for the stuff to stiffen out. Then I had to cut the bullets out. Eleven of them. Three officers had shot at him. Nearly four rounds each.

Why?

Dallas. A slow shiver crawled up my spine. Dallas, whoever he was, was watching me. With his light brown or light blue eyes.

Light blue; I'd checked.

Verne came in, and I just about jumped to the ceiling.

"We needed family approval," he explained. "I called the father."

"And?"

"Hung up halfway through."

"What about a mother?"

"Mother's a blue one." The office code for suicide.

"What about extended family?"

"Mom was an only child. The father has a brother in these parts, but it's not likely he can make it."

I sighed slowly through my nostrils.

"What's wrong?"

"Makes you wonder," I said. I was thinking back to the time when I was seventeen. When I was seventeen I was asking girls out, driving around, goofing off when I had the time, the rest of the time studying too hard for a future my father said I'd never have. At seventeen I was making plans, screwing up those plans, and learning to laugh life off all the while. At seventeen this white-haired blue-eyed boy—a boy, a boy who made a mistake, some way, somehow, and paid for it with his life. A boy, that's what he was, not the _victim of environment_ that society will evermore make him out to be—was dead. "Who really cares about this kid?"

Verne stepped closer; he reeked of burning tobacco and sleeplessness. "Didn't he show up in the newspaper last week? For saving a bunch of kids trapped in a burning church?"

"I don't read the paper, Verne."

"You should."

"You'd have unfinished toxicology reports stacked to Mount Kilimanjaro."

"True."

Either he'd taken an affinity to saying that or he wanted to see how many of my buttons he could press.

"Do you know what happened?" he said. "Sonovabitch had an unloaded gun. Semi-automatic. The minute he raised it, _blam_, the PD caught him before he could say _Gotcha_." He licked his lips, tightening around the corners.

"What makes you think he did it deliberately?"

Now Verne was looking at me as if I'd lost it. "Suicide involves some degree of deliberation. No one wakes up and says to himself: _Gee, it's a swell day to kick it, innit_?"

I rubbed at the bridge of my nose with my thumb and forefinger. "What I mean is . . . how much can a boy take before he . . ."

I found myself unable to finish the thought, staring at a crevice in the floor.

Verne filled the silence. "Common word says his friend died of burn wounds minutes before the police firing." He looked at me again, this time more closely. "You thinking of your boy, Clarence?"

"I've been pushing him too hard, Verne," I said, cracking. The unseen ghost called Dallas smiled amusedly at me like Banquo, and I, the maddened Macbeth, tried to find something to slice his amusement down to size. Some truth. Some resolution. What did he want? What do all dead want? "I'm afraid that one'a these days I'm going to find him on this table."

"You just want what's best for 'im, is all."

"Maybe that's just what drives them, though, Verne," I said. "Maybe some grieving, misguided, well-meaning father drove Dallas towards this."

Verne shook his thinning ruddy head. "I doubt it. He had his heart set on dyin', it seemed. Lil' boy blue didn't care a lick about what poor soul he'd pin his death onto. Lieutenant Brown refused to go to work for the rest of the week."

I snorted. "He might cheat the living, Verne, but the Devil garners no sympathy in death."

"_Jeez_us," my boss marveled, "who pissed in your pot?"

My mind wandered briefly away from him, towards Russet-Hair.

Then an idea struck me.

I peeled myself of my scrubs. "Hold these for me."

Verne watched me as I crossed the room and fetched a box. I'd packed Dallas' clothes in a box; for the funeral I'd have to find something more appropriate to wear than a black leather jacket, an A-shirt, torn-up steel-toe boots and a bloodstained class ring. But right now something had flared inside my mind, the simplest of things even I could have overlooked.

I opened the box and folded the first item that I saw. The A-shirt, torn in six places, soaked black-red. I continued sifting through until I found what I wanted. I shook out the black jacket.

A black-handled switchblade fell out.

I nearly smiled.

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><p><strong>AN: That's it so far. Part II to come soon. Reviews are welcome. Flames are welcome. But constructive criticism is welcome most of all. :)**


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